Olga Lyken of Randolph and her late husband Herbert Lyken drove day and night to join the landmark 1963 March On Washington. Bowdoin College student Stephen London of Milton was there, too, as was the Rev. Paul Sinn, then a United Church of Christ pastor in Whitman.

They were among the 250,000 men, women and youngsters who crowded the National Mall 50 years ago, on Aug. 28, to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and other calls for political and economic justice.

Did you join the 1963 March On Washington? Are you planning to attend the 50th anniversary march on Aug. 24? If so, we’d like to hear your story – what the 1963 rally meant to you, and why you’re going this time.

“We knew how terrible the situation was,” Herbert Lyken said in a 2003 Patriot Ledger interview, referring to Southern segregation.

Fifty years later, on Aug. 24, local members of a new generation of civil rights advocates are expected to join thousands from across the nation for the 50th anniversary of the historic march.

The president of the Boston area office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People say a caravan of NAACP buses will be joined by others chartered by labor unions and immigrant-rights groups.

Michael Curry said the march and other activities won’t be held just to commemorate the 1963 march. He sad the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision against parts of the federal voting rights act – and George Zimmerman’s acquittal in Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting – have given the event a cause it might not have had.

“It’s great to celebrate the (1963) march and the victories of the 1960s,” Boston NAACP Curry said. “But it’s time to re-ignite that conversation. It’s the right time to return to Washington.”

In 1963 the Lykens drove from their Weymouth home to Washington with four children and a white couple crowded into their station wagon. They wanted to stop for the night but were turned away at several whites-only motels.

In the 2003 interview, the Lykens said that bitter experience faded once they got to the Mall.

“Everybody felt like friends,” Olga Lyken recalled.

“Really beautiful,” Herbert Lyken agreed. “It was what America should be like.”

Page 2 of 2 - The Rev. Sinn, then 32, looks back to to the rally as “a catalyst that kept me moving” in the decades that followed.

London, now a longtime Simmons College sociology professor, won’t be attending the anniversary march. But this week he recalled that he returned to Milton in 1963 both exhausted and exhilarated by all he’d seen and heard.

“For anyone who participated, it was and remains a signature event in our lives,” he said.